Slacking at Work Stuff

Have fun!! It’s work safe, too!!!!!

Clinton vs. Obama Deathmatch

Combatting the Delusional Local Politicos

Local politicos and some screwy business leaders are blind to the obvious. They think business will relocate to Wisconsin simply because we have water availability thanks to Lake Michigan. Happily, Patrick McIlheran pointed out the fallacy of this type of thinking in an op-ed piece he wrote in Sunday’s local rag.

Some selected highlights. Any emphasis mine.

I wonder if this was what it felt like to own a polka-records company in 1977, telling yourself that with Elvis dead, the kids would forget rock and come back.

Keep waiting. Meanwhile, we’ve got lots of people saying Atlanta’s drought will be what sends ‘em all scurrying back to Milwaukee.

From the man on the street to essays in political journals, people living on the shores of the world’s largest, most beautiful backwater are figuring that the drift of people, money and power to the Sunbelt will surely end now. They want our water, so they’ll have to come back.

Even serious, thoughtful people say this. “This is a very big economic development tool for the Great Lakes region,” said Todd Ambs to Milwaukee business leaders last month. Ambs runs the water division for the Department of Natural Resources. He knows more about the flow of water than I ever will. The message, he says, is, “you can come back to the Great Lakes.”

Not going to happen, says John Kasarda, who knows more about the flow of economies than I ever will. Kasarda, who researches entrepreneurship and demographics at the University of North Carolina, says there’s simply no evidence that constrictions in water supply alone can torpedo a burgeoning region. Phoenix and Las Vegas, you might recall, thrive. The southeast isn’t short of water. It just doesn’t organize its distribution well – yet.

The people who think Atlanta’s drought will send people back here are buffoons. With telecommunications being what it is today, people can live just about anywhere they want. So, the jobs will go to where capital is welcomed and stay where it is treated fairly. As Kasarda points out:

The lake won’t save us. A new attitude might, suggests Kasarda. What made the Sunbelt as much as air conditioning was a pro-enterprise culture, he says – an encouraging attitude toward growth, a “flexible, non-union environment,” decent taxes. “They put out the red carpet for business,” he says, and it worked.

And here? “The attitude in Milwaukee toward business is awful, and you just don’t see it anywhere else,” Briggs and Stratton CEO John Shiely told a reporter this month. He and other executives had the temerity to say the same in public last winter and were excoriated as wanting “to return to the 19th century.” How dare they mouth off! Don’t they know their place?

Suppose Atlanta were rewound to some prior century – that its growth were halted. It’s gained a million people in six years; where might the next million go instead? Shiely contrasted Milwaukee with the welcoming attitude in Murray, Ky., and that should be a hint: There are lots of other Sunbelt towns. If Atlanta’s got too many people drawing from one little river, that’s solved as people spread to other rivers in the welcoming, low-tax South.

Think the above isn’t true? Guess what? Texas just surpassed New York as the state with the most “Fortune 500″ firms with 58 now in Texas.

Some of that was due to the growth of local firms but more was because of firms that relocated out of the high-tax, anti-business climates of states like the socialist shithole under Pol Pot Doyle Wisconsin. Seems to me Texas is not exactly known for having a lot of water. (As I side note, I paid $4.75/gal for avgas in Texas compared to $5.85/gal here.)

Until the negative attitudes toward business are reversed here, we’ll have plenty of water. No jobs, of course, but plenty of water.

Must Have Been a Hell of a Reception

From the MJS

Newlyweds jailed after brawl at Pittsburgh-area hotel

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A newlywed couple spent the night in separate jail cells – she in her wedding gown – after police said they brawled with each other, then members of another wedding party, at a suburban Pittsburgh hotel.

The fight started Saturday night after a reception when he knocked her to the floor with a karate kick in the seventh-floor hallway of a Holiday Inn – and escalated when she attacked two guests from another wedding party who came to her aid, police said.

The melee moved to an elevator and then to the lobby, where the couple threw metal planters at the two good Samaritans, causing minor injuries, police charged.

“It was pretty wild,” Ross police Sgt. Dave Syska said.

Dentist David W. Wielechowski, 32, of Shaler, and Christa Vattimo, 25, had married a month earlier in the Bahamas but repeated their vows Saturday at a reception for 150 guests. They were checking into their room when the argument began, police said.

Police arrived to find the dentist lying on the lobby floor and his bride, seemingly highly intoxicated, screaming.

Authorities charged each with simple assault, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct, and the bride with an additional count of public intoxication. They face a May 7 preliminary hearing.

A district judge considered issuing a restraining order against Wielechowski, but his new bride declined the measure.

The couple declined comment upon their release Sunday morning.

She left with her father, still dressed in her white gown.

Wielechowski left alone, sporting a swollen eye, tuxedo pants, a bloody T-shirt and one shoe.